EarlDoherty

Only a preliminary remark here, and hopefully I will be able to follow up in a few days. One has to realize that in looking for "correspondences" to the thought of Paul in regard to the sacrificial death of his mythical Christ at the hands of the heavenly "archons", our parameters are quite narrow. None of the dying savior gods of the mysteries had anything to do with that type of spiritual forces. Their myths had to do with dying at the hands of other gods or animals or at their own hands. Or in the case of Mithras, not dying at all. Which is not to say that the Greeks didn't have beliefs in evil spirits.

So we have to turn to Jewish and Gnostic writings, the latter being (in regard to their cosmologies and salvation theories) at least partly Jewish, or Hellenistic Jewish, and their writings/scripture. Then we have to shrink the focus even further and look at Jewish/Gnostic sectarian philosophies that envisioned the death of a divine figure. That narrows the field to very little outside Christianity where we can expect to find "correspondences". At the same time, though, we can consider some Jewish/Gnostic writings that included heavenly spirit powers that had a role in salvation (or against it) but not in regard to the killing of a god. And not all of these few used the word "archons".

This is why it is a bit of a red herring for people like GakuseiDon to be constantly demanding exact or even close parallels in pagan thought to support mythicist interpretations of Paul and particularly passages like 1 Corinthians 2:8. We have to realize that early Christian cultic belief was a phenomenon in itself, not necessarily directly dependent on parallels in the world beyond or derived from one particular antecedent. The best we can do is look for 'neighboring' influences and related 'branches' of a very broad tree that grew over centuries throughout the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, and see what people and circles like Paul absorbed and what they fashioned for themselves. That's why I appeal to "indicators" rather than "proofs", common impulses 'in the air' rather than direct borrowings. And for that we can include elements of pagan and Jewish thought not specifically tied to gods done in by demon spirits.

Anyway, I'll try to put a few thoughts together over the next few days.

All the best,
Earl Doherty

Malachi151

Well, specifically, let's discuss The Book of Enoch, The Martyrdom of Isaiah, and The Apocalypse of Adam, and like works.

In The Book of Enoch we find "The Watchers" and various named angels.

http://www.johnpratt.com/items/docs/enoch.html

Etc...

In The Martyrdom of Isaiah we have "the prince of this world, and of his angels, and his authorities and his powers", which I believe is Beliar, or Satan?, correct?:

http://www.earlychristianwritings.co...ascension.html

In The Apocalypse of Adam we have "the powers" and "the illuminators":

http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/adam.html

Now, unless I am reading something wrong, "the prince of this world" in The Martyrdom of Isaiah is a "heavenly" being. The same for the rest of these angels, Watchers, powers, Illuminators, etc.

Do we see in these works, and others like them, something equivalent to the "archons" in 1 Corinthians 2?

It must also be noted that Paul believed that women should cover their heads so as not to tempt the angles, a view that is compatible with the description of the angels in The Book of Enoch, who come down to earth and defile women.

EarlDoherty

Malachi brought up the subject of “archons” (ARXONTES) with a view to determining whether there was any widespread, including pre-Christian, usage of the term or concept to refer to a class of angels or evil spirits operating in the heavens and impacting on salvation. If so, this would increase the likelihood that Paul in 1 Cor 2:8 was referring to such heavenly spirits as the crucifiers of Christ.

Greek thought, certainly from Plato on, did envision “daemons” in the heavens as divine intermediaries, though not necessarily evil ones, but by the time we get to the turn of the era, gentiles as well as Jews had a widespread belief in the malevolent activity of demons. However, as I said in my earlier preliminary post, the myths of the savior gods did not involve evil spirits in the stories of their deaths, so we are not going to find Paul-like parallels in Hellenistic salvation mythology (on which we have little enough extant writing in any case, the pagan mysteries being ‘secret’). So we have to turn largely to Jewish writings and Jewish or Hellenistic-Jewish sectarian documents.

Jewish writers, especially in sectarian groups, envisioned classes of angels in the heavens, some attending on God, others engaging in activities that impacted on humanity, some harmful. The earliest reference in Genesis (6:2-4) has these “sons of the gods” impregnating human women and creating a race of giants. But overall, there is very little about evil spirits in the OT. They come into their own with the apocryphal and pseudepigraphic writings. By the time we get to Paul, they have become vast powers that infest the heavens (Rom 8:38, 1 Cor 10:20, Eph 3:10 and 6:12). Col 1:16 talks of invisible orders of “thrones, sovereignties, authorities and powers.” That they are malevolent forces which need countering at the highest level is clear from Col 2:25, where Christ triumphs over them through his death.

In 1 Enoch evil exists in the world because of evil angels. 6:1f (which Malachi quoted) is a midrashic reworking and expansion of Gen. 6:2-4. The intertestamental period witnesses a fixation on these evil spirits, in which one theory and another saw them as forces which needed redeeming, overcoming or simply destroying, something God had supposedly promised. It was usually the role of the savior figure (whether he died or not) to perform that task. Pauline thought (including pseudo-Paul) fits right into that mindset, most notably in 1 Cor 2:6-8 and Eph 3:9-11. As for the fallen “Watchers” in 1 Enoch, for their sin of bringing death and evil into the world they will be condemned to be imprisoned within the earth for eternity (ch.14) or in a “terrible place” which is neither heaven nor earth (ch.21).

The Testament of Solomon, much edited over the early centuries CE, goes back probably to Palestinian Judaism of the 1 century. It is concerned with Solomon and his relations with the demons and establishing control over them. In this regard, Solomon is the ‘savior’ figure, providing the reader with magical ways to counter the power of these demons over human lives. (What a wretched universe the ancients thought they lived in, and the Jesus of the Gospels only added to the insanity.)

Here’s a passage from the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (I, p.952). Note the points of contact with Pauline expression, as well as the association between evil spirits and areas of the heavens. (That there is nothing ‘sublunar’ here shows that the variety of thought and cosmology during this period makes protestations like that of GakuseiDon about whether Middle Platonism, or a Jewish equivalent, required such and such to take place below or above the moon—“it needs to be one or the other, Earl!”—totally misplaced and irrelevant. Structures and divisions of the heavens, earth and underworld were a riotous diversity. Rabbinic writings generally envision seven spheres, but we also encounter two or three.)

GDon would also be quite interested in a passage in The Questions of Ezra, Recension B:

The cosmology of this document (see OT Pseud. I, p.591f) is quite unlike others. There are seven heavens, but the lower ones of these (presumably above the moon) are evil, and Hell is located in the third heaven. But we also have locations styled “upper atmosphere” and “(lower) atmosphere.” Perhaps the latter is below the moon, but we can’t tell, though I suspect that it is. In any case, the demons operate in that part of the atmosphere, and this is above the earth, since freed souls fall from there to earth. So we have a clear distinction between the areas dominated by the demons and earth itself.

In Recension B quoted above, the material about Christ may seem to have been incorporated into an older document which did not contain him, as there is no role for Christ present in the ‘salvation’ part of the picture where souls are freed from Satan’s clutches through prayer and sacrifices by loved ones on earth. On the other hand, perhaps the presence of “Christ” in this document is not a later layer, but simply the reflection of a sect distinct from the Pauline which expected a non-sacrificial Christ/Messiah from heaven at the End-time (the trumpet at God’s arrival is a fairly common Jewish motif). There are divine Messiahs in the Similitudes of Enoch and the Odes of Solomon who save by other means than sacrificial (even in the Gospel of John, whose Jesus saves by imparting knowledge of God and whose crucifixion is not atoning). The addition of an ‘intermediate’ “Christ” phase, non-sacrificial, is present in the Hellenistic Synagogal Prayers, and a “Christ” is present as a divine aeon in some Gnosticism unrelated to the Gospel figure.

In view of such cosmological contexts as the Questions of Ezra it is not hard to see how certain sects and cults with a sacrificial deity—and early Christianity on the Pauline side was one such—could fit the death of their savior into the heavens. If the activities of deities were seen generally as taking place there (which was the dominant thought of the era) then assigning such a death to a certain layer of the heavens—a low one, whether stipulated as below the moon or not—would be a natural choice, with the defeat of such evil powers being a major consequence, as in Col 2:15, Eph 3:10, and, of course, 1 Cor 2:6-8.

The “lower atmosphere” element in Questions of Ezra has elements similar to the situation in the Ascension of Isaiah, in distinction to the earth’s surface (which should make Don happy—or maybe not). Here the demons operate to imprison souls, which is within striking distance of operating to crucify a descending god. Certain common language and motifs among all the parties bring Paul’s thought of 1 Cor 2 within the same orbit.

We all know by now that there’s a good helping of evil angels in the Ascension of Isaiah and that chapter 7 makes it clear that they operate below the firmament, which is to say below the first heaven, placing it below the moon. Chapter 9 may be a little less clear-cut, but it looks like it is Satan (the god of that world) and his devils who do the hanging of the descending Son in the firmament, since it is from them (“from the heavens”) that the Son’s identity has been hidden, a motif repeated again in 11:23-4. The Ascension is the closest parallel we have to the apparent cosmology of the Christ cult as found in Paul. It seems to spell out what is only hinted at in Paul, which is not to say that all cosmological details were necessarily identical. In fact, in view of the great diversity of schemes in evidence, it may be the case that they were not.

Malachi calls attention to “the powers” in the Apocalypse of Adam. The term is often used in Gnostic literature to refer to a class of celestial beings, alongside angels (the distinction is often unclear and may have been unclear to the writers), and in this document “aeons” which can also refer to spheres of the heavens or offspring of God in the heavenly Pleroma. Trying to arrive at precise delineations for such terms is an exercise in nailing Gnostic jelly to the wall. It’s yet another example of the folly of trying to bring literal meaning to the ideas contained in these ancient sectarian thought-worlds. Meanings and motifs are fluid and can vary from one group and document to another (making Don’s now defunct appeal to “Ocellus” as a universal determinant quite meaningless). There was no universality or consistency, somewhat like the situation in apocalyptic writings such as Revelation, which are all about imagery and mythical ‘triggers’ that create subliminal responses in the readers or listeners.

The ancient mind, especially in sectarian settings like these (and that includes early cultic Christ belief), was not wired like that of the modern scientific age, which is something I can’t seem to get across to people like Don who insist on demanding specific, literal interpretations of all this mythology. Who could make ‘sense’ of the Apocalypse of Adam’s myth/concept that Adam and Eve began as “a single androgynous being,” which then split apart and at their fall, the former “glory” that attached to them passed back into other heavenly beings/aeons while the knowledge they had possessed flowed into their posterity, Seth? Who would see anything literal (let alone on an historical earth) in that document’s descriptions of the 13 myths of the Third Illuminator, a Gnostic savior figure unrelated to the Gospel Jesus? Here, he is “nourished in the heavens…and came to the bosom of his mother…Solomon himself sent out his army of demons to seek out the virgin…[his mother came] down to the aeon which is below in order to gather flowers. She became pregnant from the desire of the flowers, and gave birth to him in that place,” and so on. Compare this sort of thing with Revelation 12, where “a woman robed with the sun” gives birth in the heavens, pursued by a dragon, her child snatched up to God’s heaven immediately after birth to await the End-time, the woman fleeing “into the wilds, where she had a place prepared for her by God, there to be sustained for twelve hundred and sixty days” (this is supposed to be on earth?! These are mythical, non-historical events, pure and simple. They make moot and irrelevant all objections to mythicism based on a passage like Galatians' “born of woman.”

Such texts are a prime example of how this riotous universe of many levels, spiritual and material, was interconnected, forces operating across all barriers and divisions, gods, powers and even humans ascending and descending, interacting, changing shape and character. This is not simple imagination, it is an immersion of the mind in a grand fantastic cosmos of life spiritual and material, the latter proceeding out of and dependent upon the former (the latter a copy of the “genuine” former), the experience of vivid visions and revelations, striving to escape the body and regain heaven, a chaotic insanity. To peel off the imposed Gospel veneer from Paul is to see that world, and Paul is as insane as any other, with his visions of a cosmic Christ, his mystic sacramentalism, his unification with Christ in a combined ‘body,’ his demonic forces, his preached “folly” of a crucified god, his own ascent to the third heaven and his expectation of a Christ arriving on the clouds with believers ascending to meet him in the air. Without the down-to-earth translation the Gospels gave him, he would be looked upon as no less crazy than the opinions we adopt today about the bizarre looniness in most of the Gnostic documents of Nag Hammadi. The only thing crazier is to imagine that Paul didn’t think like the rest of the cults of his time. 1 Thess 4:14f is sufficient to show that he did, and why American fundamentalism today, with its Rapture, is a throwback to all that.

We could also look at Jewish Merkabah mysticism. For our purposes, the important element of this secret mystic study and experience involved an ascent through the heavens to reach the throne of God, where one entered the Divine presence and gained knowledge of the mysteries of the heavenly world. Merkabah mysticism began during the first part of the 1st century CE, growing out of Jewish apocalyptic with which it had certain things in common, and came into its own after 70. There is also much in common between Merkabah and Gnosticism. One of these is the idea that there is a series of heavenly spheres separating God and man; each of these spheres is under the control of an angel, or archon, who serves to block access to higher spheres and to God. Secret knowledge is required to bypass these hostile spirits and gain Heaven. Gnosticism is primarily concerned with such an ascent after death; Merkabah focuses on achieving such a mystical ascent during life, while in a trance state during an organized séance. Both traditions have the concept of a heavenly figure (usually one or more angels) coming to earth and instructing the adept in the secrets of the heavens and conducting him on a visionary ascent. Of course, we get that in ‘proto-Christian’ documents like the Ascension, too. The mythology of such groups often involves fallen angels or “archons” who are subordinate gods, and there is a regular theme of angelic opposition to humanity, either on the part of good angels who are protective of God’s transcendence and bar the way to him, or on the part of malevolent angels who are devoted to foiling humanity’s quest for God and salvation.

The gnostic Hypostasis of the Archons (94-95) tells the tale of Samael, created as the first archon and claiming lordship over all of creation, suffering demotion to Tartarus for his presumption. We might note that here, as in so much Gnostic and Jewish sectarian literature, there is a wealth of mythology concerning angelic forces in the heavens which is neither placed on earth nor regarded as allegory, but a reflection of perceived actual happenings at some non-historical time, with much activity across heavenly boundaries and much interaction with the world of man and matter. All of it is for the sake of humanity’s enlightenment, fate and salvation. It was the mark of the age, and to try to deny that this “world of myth” did not exist or did not constitute a governing template for much sectarian expression in the centuries around the turn of the era is an apologetic conceit. Such mythology is hardly concerned with distant primordial history on earth. That would be an anachronism for our period, even if the myths themselves continued to reflect a language and spirit which is a throwback to that earlier way of seeing things, since that is when the myths were first formulated. And as I have continually said, the “average pagan” or Jew may not have exercised his thinking that scrupulously (if he was even capable of or interested in it) to make a clear differentiation between the primordial and the Platonic.

Philosophers are another matter. Plutarch in Isis and Osiris presents both, the primordial myths anchored originally in perceived (pre-)history, and the Platonic level (as in chapter 54), in which Osiris repeats the process of dismemberment/death and resuscitation to life at the hands of Isis. Plutarch himself may have been too sophisticated to regard such legends as anything but allegorical, but he is hardly representative of the cult devotee (he was not one himself). It is hardly to be thought that those devotees would take the myths the same way, dismissing the whole thing as a vast allegory. Ask yourself whether the “average Christian” today would be willing or capable of seeing all the biblical accounts, including the story of Jesus, as nothing but allegory.

It is equally incredible to think that in an age dominated by this pervasive cosmology of the divine heavens and their relationship to earth and its humans, by the concept that in heaven could be found the divine counterpart to earthly copies (“as on earth, so in heaven,” Heavenly Jerusalem, and so on), that salvation is achieved in heaven through (or despite) the actions of heavenly figures, that the members of any cult would simply ignore all this and regard their gods as having acted in a distant primordial past. This is the fundamental flaw in Don’s objection to my theory: it entirely ignores and dismisses the spirit of the age as reflected in the documents I’ve pointed to here and elsewhere, and in Platonism generally. As I’ve acknowledged, we have no clear statement in the pagan arena about the placement of the mystery gods’ activities for the Christian era, but the inferences we can make from the available information throughout the extant documents of the period are compelling. (And again, see my Appendix 6 in The Jesus Puzzle.)

By way of a postscript, and to bring us back more specifically to the original OP, we can note that Origen read Paul as referring to demon archons in 1 Cor 2:6-8. In De Principiis, Book III, ch. 3, Origen discusses the meaning of Paul’s phrasing, including “the wisdom of the princes of this world” (a misleading translation by the ANF, since it ought to be “princes (archons) of this age” which implies something much broader in time and space than “world,” which only implies an earthly, historical venue). Origen imagines that the archons had individual ‘wisdoms’ which they imparted to those under their control, relating to “secret and occult philosophy…and also that manifold variety of opinion which prevails among the Greeks regarding divine things.” He takes from the scriptures “that there are princes over individual nations; as in Daniel [Dan.10] we read that there was a prince of the kingdom of Persia, and another prince of the kingdom of Graecia, who are clearly shown, by the nature of the passage, to be not human beings, but certain powers. In the prophecies of Ezekiel (Ezek.26], also, the prince of Tyre is unmistakeably shown to be a kind of spiritual power.” Immediately after, when he discusses that such heavenly powers reacted to the Savior coming into the world to discredit all their ‘wisdom’ by arranging to destroy him through the crucifixion, “not knowing what was concealed within Him,” (he is paraphrasing Paul here) he quotes Psalm 2:2, “the kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers assembled together, against the Lord and His Christ.” Here Origen shows that he himself regards that arrangement as a conspiracy between earthly rulers and the heavenly archons, or to put it another favored way, the archons acting through earthy princes. Sure, that is the interpretation placed on it in a post-Gospel period, but my point is that it is significant that Origen still regards the TWN ARXONTWN TOU AIWNOS TOUTOU as unmistakeably a reference to angelic demons and understands Paul’s meaning in that way.

In regard to the latter, he must be correct, since such a view would hardly have arisen post-Paul and post-Gospels if it did not in fact exist in Paul’s mind and time. Origen is preserving an earlier traditional meaning for such “archons” but with a post-Gospel spin imposed on it. However, there is nothing in Paul himself which indicates or justifies such a spin. Certainly not in view of something like Romans 13:3-4: “Rulers [here using ARXONTES in its human meaning] hold no terrors for them who do right…(the ruler) is the minister of God for your own good…He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” Are we to assume Paul is fully cognizant of the ruler Pilate and his Gospel role, contradicting the spirit of his statement and requiring the clear implication that Jesus was a wrongdoer? Or, more sensibly, did he know nothing of Pilate or other earthly rulers who had a hand in the death of his Christ Jesus?

For both Greeks and Jews, the heavenly archons were a force to be reckoned with, and they figure prominently in a variety of salvation mythology among Jews and Gnostics. When we analyze the thought behind the Pauline epistles and early Christianity, we need to stop imposing our own preferences on the texts and get with the program....

All the best,
Earl Doherty

Gregg

Hi Earl! How you been?

Fascinating stuff. I'm inclined to be a bit more forgiving of Paul and the other mystics of the age, though. They may seem insane by our modern standards but probably not so much by the standards of their time. I think it's important to keep in mind that back then life for the vast majority of people was nasty, brutish, short, and filled with pain. Even the more educated and wealthy people didn't have it so great when it came to health challenges; a "doctor" was probably more likely to make you feel worse, or even kill you. Diseases that give us no more than sniffles today killed then. Children were regularly stillborn or died young. And the heavens seemed close enough to touch, especially if you went up on a mountain. So it's hardly surprising that many people sought escape from "reality" in what they imagined was a higher reality, where all crying and suffering and death were done away with. It's also not surprising that many of them saw invisible demonic spirits as the source of their ills and misfortunes.

Paul's visions also hold echoes of ancient shamanism. I saw a fascinating documentary a while back that presented compelling evidence that shamans around the world, at widely separated times, had remarkably similar visions which can be duplicated by stimulating the optic nerve. A point made in the documentary was that to the shamans, the world they saw in their visions was more real than the world of their waking eyes. It's believed that many if not most early cave and rock paintings were not paintings of living animals and the like, but of things shamans saw in their visions. (That explains the paintings in the almost inaccessible caverns in France ... they were painted by shamans who used these dark, silent, natural sensory deprivation chambers to stimulate visions, then after having the vision lit a torch and painted it on the ceiling above them.)

When I was a kid, I often had a kind of "swept up" feeling, that seemed incredibly real and vivid. I would see a mass of clouds, or perhaps a building set on a distant hill that seemed almost suspended in the air, and I would briefly go into a trance-like state in which I felt caught up in the atmosphere, weightless, flying. When I came out if it it was like I'd been in a dream. It's not hard for me to imagine ancient people having similar experiences but, unlike me, not realizing they were just the mind playing tricks.

So, I have to give Paul a break. Who knows what WE would have been like, had we lived back then?

Malachi151

What are the proper terms for all these writings, or is there a proper term? In my article I simply called them "apocalyptic and messianic literature", but it seems to be that we have this scenario:

We have the LXX, which was viewed as a pretty official set of literature and basis for Jewish religion.

We have other, what I call, apocalyptic and messianic literature", which was generally written from the 2nd century BCE to the 2nd century CE.

We have the "Christian" set of literature, which itself includes the Gnostic and the "proto-Catholic" for lack of a better term.

There are probably more varieties of literature and thought that this as well.

Now, it seems to me that what we are looking at when we look at "Christian literature" is that we look at the OT and the NT, but there is a gap in that picture of this apocalyptic literature that fits in between these two and really explains the worldview out of which the Christian writings emerged.

All of this apocalyptic literature, including the Christian writings, sources back to the LXX or its Hebrew equivalent, i.e. the older scriptures from which all of this body of literature drew ideas, but the Christian writings aren't drawn directly from the LXX, rather they are a part of this other larger collection of apocalyptic literature, all of which draws on the older scriptures, but without looking at the "missing link" you fail to see the other concepts and story elements that the Christian literature was drawing from as well.

EarlDoherty

I quite agree that Paul and others of his age were not "insane" by the standards of their time, but we are, or should be, evaluating them by our standards. And quite rightly, since the issue is whether we should be accepting and promoting the ideas of the first century in the 21st century, and basing our lives and hopes on them. To call them "insane" may be deliberately provocative on my part, but it's hardly hyperbole. The ideas of the age in regard to cosmology and the workings of the universe, between divinity and humanity, spirit and flesh, were simply bonkers, without the slightest foundation in observable reality. We have inherited 2000 years of bizarre beliefs based on that primitive unreality, which too many people simply won't let go of even in the face of modern enlightenment and scientific discovery.

I fully agree that Paul was just like everyone else, and that if we ourselves lived in that period we might well have believed the same way. Regardless of what may have been a superior intellect, Paul was still a child of his time. Angels and devils, Heaven and Hell, the blood sacrifice of a deity, raptures and antichrists and fiery judgments, along with assorted mystical gobbledegook, were all part of the stock in trade. The difference between Paul and ourselves, however, is that we in the 21st century have no excuse.

All the best,
Earl Doherty

gurugeorge

Great posts. I'd like to also like to add something re. that "insane" question.

That multitude of world-systems, demonic menageries, etc., etc., seems mad to us because most of us don't have the kinds of visions people in those days were more prone to. It's open to anybody to practice what Western occultists call "astral travelling" (like lucid dreaming while awake) and anybody can experience "visions" that seem very real, solid and 3-dimensional, but not many people who would consider themselves cultured or intellectual do that sort of thing nowadays. But I venture to suggest that the vast majority of writings that come down to us today from that time that have anything to do with spiritural matters, were the result of these kinds of real-seeming encounters with real-seeming entities, but had by people who were often, in their own context, quite respectable thinkers.

So while it all seems a bit mad to us now, what with several centuries of science under our belts, and while we can understand (roughly) that, interesting as these visions might be in themselves as experiences, we'd need a much higher standard of proof if we were to say they were representational of anything actually existing, rather than (as we would now understand them) peculiar experiences resulting from peculiar spiritual exercises, still and all, we can't fault those people for believing in things they actually seemed to themselves to have experienced. The same scientific standards and understandings just weren't around in those days.

IOW the seeming reality of these experiences can be incredibly strong - it's not just like, they had these vague ideas and vague imaginings and gerrymandered them into intellectual theoretical constructs. It's that in their own subjective experience they actually met the spirits and angels they were talking about, and those spirits gave them these lists and heirarchies, etc., that they reproduced - the entities they met in these visions were as real seeming (to them) as physical people.

I often think academic discussion of these matters doesn't proceed quite in the right way because academics (not being prone to these kinds of experiences) don't get how real seeming they can be - which leads to mistaking them either as a kind of intellectual fraud or some kind of stupidity.

Malachi151

Earl, I have a suggestion that I think you would be able to do a great job of. I'd like to see a good book discussing specifically the world views and cosmologies of 2nd century BCE - 1st century CE Hellenistic Judaism.

Basically, forget about Paul for a moment and simply give a better analysis of the world view of the time.

My view of it is that during this time there was defiantly a view of the world as having multiple layers of underworld, the surface world that humans lived in, then layers of the heavens, and all of these were real physical places that people could in theory travel to if they were capable, and sometimes this happened supposedly.

Angels were real physical beings in some cases, with human forms and real wings so that they could travel between the heavens and the surface world, etc.

The thing that I think seems odd to people is that there was this view of this as all very real, tangible and material. "Heaven" wasn't some spiritual notion or abstract concept, it was right there just above the clouds, and if you got on a high enough mountain you might be able to throw rocks into it, and "heaven forbid" you hit an angel and piss him off at you.

If what I am saying makes sense, then I think the next step for you is to present this worldview better. I think the biggest problem people have with your view of Paul is that we aren't exposed to this view of the world but I think that with some explanation its not at all inconceivable.

EarlDoherty

Hmmm...I wonder if I've got enough years left for that! Actually, I'm still plugging away at a projected Second Edition for TJP, which might turn out to be handled by a major publisher instead of myself if present attempts by an agent bear fruit. One area of the book I will be expanding in either case will be that very thing.

Some good opinions offered by gugugeorge, visions and glossalalia were certainly indulged in and valued by sectarian cultists, but I also think that some of the "insane" invention may have been a little more carefully contrived. Paul certainly has his emotional side, but I see a lot of devious manipulation between the lines of his writing. He desperately wanted to be an apostle, and for that he needed to come up with his own "dues", visions and interpretations of the scriptures, and I have a feeling he did that with a greater measure of deliberate planning than a reliance on actual out of body experiences. His exegetical arguments and analogies are too often obvious contrivances, and his arguments on topics like the law never appeal to visionary revelations on these subjects. In that respect, he reminds me of modern Christian evangelists who like to intimate that they've been in personal contact with the Lord, but whose antics and ravings in the pulpit seem like a lot of phoney showmanship designed more to bring in the customers and provide them with a lucrative career in the public eye.

All the best,
Earl Doherty

Malachi151

Just another text here, The Apocalypse Of Zephaniah:

http://userpages.burgoyne.com/bdespa...s/progzeph.htm